New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a spine—including all mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians—evolved. In a paper ...

Same-sex sexual behaviour may help monkeys and apes rise up the social ranks and ultimately have more offspring – and it seems to be especially beneficial in harsh environments where there are lots of ...

Gordon Burghardt kept a lion cub named Meg in his home at the behest of the Knoxville Zoo. To help Meg get out some energy, Burghardt and his wife would often play with Meg in their wooded, unfenced ...

Newer languages might soak up all the glory, but these die-hard languages have their place. Here are eight languages developers still use daily, and what they’re good for. The computer revolution has ...

My little theory is that the concept of “imprinting” in psychology can just as easily be applied to programming: Much as a baby goose decides that the first moving life-form it encounters is its ...

Genomic approaches have transformed how we study microorganisms, which shape nearly every aspect of life on Earth. Featuring a range of article types, including Reviews, Comments and Journal Club ...

Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the ...

An updated evolutionary model shows that living systems evolve in a split-and-hit-the-gas dynamic, where new lineages appear in sudden bursts rather than during a long marathon of gradual changes.

Modern humans are evolutionary survivors, thriving generation after generation while our ancient relatives died out. Now, new research into our brain chemistry suggests that an enzyme unique to Homo ...

Sleep is not just a human quirk or a nighttime luxury; it is one of biology’s most ancient survival tools. Long before humans, mammals, or even brains existed, primitive creatures were already ...

If humans evolved, like all animal species, largely via natural selection, then we would expect our physical and behavioral features to largely serve the primary evolutionary functions of survival and ...

What if a machine could not only write code but also improve itself, learning and evolving without any human intervention? The Darwin Godel Machine (DGM), hailed as the world’s first self-improving ...